Italy

Anti-immigrant violence and riots explode against the background
of economic crisis

www.socialistworld.net, 19/01/2010 website of the committee for a workers' international, CWI

United class response needed to prevent unleashing of racism

Cedric Gerome, CWI

The anger felt by hundreds of African immigrants exploded on Thursday 7
January in Rosarno, a small town in the largely impoverished,
agricultural region of Calabria, in Southern Italy. This followed a
racist provocation by local young people, who shot with an air gun at a
group of immigrant farm workers on the way back from work. This incident
was the detonator for riots and protests, with some immigrants clashing
for hours with the police and local inhabitants, breaking shop windows,
burning and smashing cars with sticks, etc. Subsequently, a brutal
witch-hunt followed against the immigrants, undertaken by some local
inhabitants, including savage beatings with iron bars, and immigrants
being knocked down deliberately by cars. More than 60 people were
injured in what were probably the most violent racial clashes which have
taken place in Italy for years. A number of immigrant workers fled the
city, while more than one thousand of those remaining were put by the
police in buses and trains to be evacuated over the weekend to detention
centres in Crotone, Bari and Brindisi. The immigrants’ makeshift
encampments were subsequently bulldozed.

’Modern Slave Labour’ for the Mafia

The recent events in Rosarno have, first of all, revealed the terrible
conditions facing immigrant workers in Southern Italy. In their protest,
some of the immigrants carried placards saying, “We are not animals”.
Immigrants in this area are living and working in near slave conditions,
over-exploited by local bosses and severely controlled by the
‘Ndrangheta’, the Calabrian Mafia, who use them as a very cheap and
pliable labour force, without any rights. As was pointed out by a
30-year-old worker from Ghana, interviewed by the Italian newspaper, “Il
Manifesto”, “We are treated like beasts. We work so much; at the present
time, I harvest mandarins and oranges, and I receive 20 euros for the
whole day.” The same newspaper revealed that, according to an
investigation in May 2009, these workers“were beaten in the case of any
slowing down of the rhythm of harvesting the fruit”.

Clashes in Rosarno

Calabria is home to some 20,000 illegal immigrants, according to the
CGIL trade union. Most of them work as seasonal labourers, picking fruit
and vegetables. In Rosarno alone, 1,500 were living in abandoned
factories, with no running water, sanitation or electricity. They were
employed, most of them illegally, to be paid 20-25 euros (sometimes
less) for 12 to 14 hours work a day. As was recently reported by the
human rights group, Médecins Sans Frontières, “Many of them are affected
by respiratory and muscular problems because of their unhealthy living
conditions and long working hours.”

Rosarno is only the tip of the iceberg of an immense system of fraud and
exploitation in which the Mafia is playing a central role, relying on
the subjugation of this very cheap workforce for the maximisation of
their profits. This, among other diverse activities, like international
drug and arms trafficking, public works fraud and prostitution,
represents a very lucrative business for organised crime. Official
estimates indicate that the ’Ndrangheta’ made Euro 44 billion (more than
$60 billion) profits in 2008 alone.

The economic crisis has only contributed to worsening the immigrants’
situation even further. Because of the decline of the prices of citrus
fruits, and the flood of the Italian market by cheap imported fruit from
abroad (notably Spanish oranges and Brazilian orange juice), a lot of
owners in the area decided that these immigrant workers were not
profitable anymore, or that their wages needed to be driven down
further. Here is manifested once again the absurdity of the blind market
system: since the owners received European Union subsidies for every
cultivated hectare, it has become sometimes more profitable to let the
fruits rot on the trees, than to pay workers to harvest them.

For the above reasons, the involvement of the local mafia in
orchestrating the racist attacks and feeding the explosion of violence
in order to “clean up the place” and maintain its control over the area,
fearing social agitation, is far from excluded. But whatever the role of
the mafia in these events has been, their political and social
implications are much wider. They must serve as a warning to the working
class, in Italy and internationally, of the dangers that could develop
in the present period of historical crisis of world capitalism, if the
rising social anger and frustration is not assisted by a positive
programme and a conscious collective struggle to change society along
socialist lines.

Thousands attend local demonstration

“We are not racists”

Commenting on the Rosarno events, the Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s
newspaper, came out denouncing “the racism of the Italian people”, and
criticising the fact that “the value of the mixing of different races
has still not been understood”. As if the present situation, in one of
the poorest regions of Italy hit hard by poverty and mass unemployment -
at about 25%, the worst rate in the whole country - was a haven of peace
and well-being!

It is true, however, that racist attacks and violence have been on the
rise in Italy in the recent period. Nevertheless, this can hardly be
explained by the simplistic view that “Italian people are racists”. The
worsening social conditions, the lack of jobs, the systematic attacks on
living standards, and the gloomy future offered by the capitalist
crisis, combined with the lack of a viable alternative on the left, have
opened a vacuum. Racist propaganda and projecting blame for the crisis
onto immigrants are feeding on this.

Significantly, on Monday 11 January, several thousand people from
Rosarno - out of a population of 15,000 - demonstrated in the streets of
their town, with some immigrants of African origin at the head of the
march, rejecting the accusations of “racism” against them, with some
accusing the State of having abandoned them to their problems, and done
absolutely nothing about the disastrous conditions in which the
immigrants were forced to live. This kind of reaction is an indication
that the violent racist attacks committed by some inhabitants are not
widely accepted by the local population.

Contrary to what the Vatican’s statement suggests, racism is not a
problem of a lack of moral virtue. It is a social problem, rooted in the
class-based and divide-and-rule policy of capitalist society. As Malcolm
X pointed out, “you cannot have capitalism without racism”. In the
absence of a united struggle for decent jobs and living standards, the
unprecedented increase of immigrant workers fleeing the misery of the
neo-colonial world, in the context of the economic crisis, can only
become a factor of growing tensions and competition for jobs between the
immigrants and the local inhabitants. According to “Le Monde”, for the
year 2009 alone, Italy has registered a 75% increase in immigration
arrivals.

The only ones who profit from these divisions are the bosses and the
Mafia, using this “war of the poor against the poor” to increase the
exploitation of labour and maintain their rule over the economy. The
vulnerable and insecure position in which most immigrant workers are
forced to live constitutes an integral part of this process. “In reality
people who came to Italy illegally make up a big part of its 5
million-strong immigrant population. Many sustain parts of the economy
that would otherwise be uncompetitive”, commented ‘The Economist’.

Police clash with immigrant demonstrators

Race riots: the government’s policy has opened up a Pandora’s box

Following the events in Rosarno, Home Affairs Minister, Roberto Maroni,
from the anti-immigrant party, the Northern League (coalition partner of
the Berlusconi government), said that this violence was a result of
“years of excessive tolerance” of illegal workers in Italy. He then
added that the government will eventually deport all illegal immigrants
who took part in the riots. In fact, many of the immigrants were legally
in Italy, some having moved south when they lost their jobs in factories
in the north because of the economic crisis.

Over the last two years, the right-wing Italian government has deployed
a long series of harshly repressive and racist measures against
immigrants, which can hardly be described as “excessive tolerance”.
These include the legalisation of ‘civilian patrols’ to control the
immigrants, the forcing of public officials to inform on un-documented
refugees, the organisation of punitive raids against gypsy camps, the
criminalization of those helping ‘illegal’ workers, with the threat of a
3 year prison sentence, or the forced turning back on the open seas of
boats with refugees arriving on Italian coasts, thus denying refugees
the right to claim asylum.

The Berlusconi government and the Northern League have been at the
forefront of consciously fuelling racism against immigrants, exploiting
the fears of Italian workers and the lack of a collective response to
the social problems from workers organisations. Minister for reform and
founder of the Northern League, Umberto Bossi, has been reported on
several occasions as nicknaming African migrants ‘Bingo-Bongos”, in
reference to a 1982-movie from which the main character was an ape-man.
In “Il Sole 24 Ore”, the main newspaper owned by Berlusconi, the term
“Negro” is commonly used to describe the African immigrants.

Recently, the local council of the Northern town of Coccaglio launched
an immigrant purge under the cynical name of “White Christmas”,
consisting an officially-sanctioned drive to identify and expel as many
non-Europeans as possible before Christmas. The town’s Northern League
Mayor, Franco Claretti, declared “We just want to start cleaning the
place up.”

This kind of campaign, combined with an increasing social crisis and
casualisation of labour, heavily encouraged by the government and pushed
along by the economic downturn, as well as the total impunity with which
the Mafia imposes its strong grip on the economic structure of Southern
Italy, have contributed to create an explosive cocktail, of which what
happened in Rosarno is a direct result. The government is now cynically
attempting to exploit this to tighten up further its policy against
immigrants, in an increasing campaign to provide a scapegoat for the
country’s economic demise and deflect blame away from the capitalists.

On 8 January, all state schools received a document giving some
“guidelines for integration of immigrant students”. This includes the
introduction of a maximum cap of 30% of immigrant students to be
accepted in state schools. Since then, some leaders of the Northern
League have added their own statements proposing other very imaginative
ideas, like train carriages available for Italian people only, or
restriction access to the social security system for “native Italians”.

In reaction to this, the leader of the main opposition, Democratic Party
(PD) Pier Luigi Bersani, accused the Northern League of blaming illegal
immigration and denounced its racist stand. However, while in power, the
centre-left, elected on the promise of reversing the anti-immigration
laws adopted during the previous legislature (notably the Bossi-Fini
law, which facilitates the expulsion of immigrants from the country) has
done absolutely nothing in this respect.

Immigrant camps bulldozed

Only a united struggle of the working class can stop racism and prevent
‘new Rosarnos’

Capitalism is responsible for what happened in Rosarno. The economic
crisis is causing rocketing unemployment and spreading misery around the
world. Racist and reactionary politicians will inevitably use the
immigration issue to divert attention, divide the working class and
prevent a common struggle of exploited workers and youth which could
threaten the privileges and position of the capitalist ruling elite.

In Vic, a city in the eastern Catalonia region of Spain, the town’s
administration has launched a plan to stop allowing immigrants, who make
up roughly a quarter of the population of 40,000, to register as
residents and to deny them the right to access healthcare and other
services.

If the workers’ leaders fail to put forward a political way out and
prevent this kind of racist policy being implemented, the ground will be
prepared for new racial explosions, such as the events in Rosarno. The
collapse of the left in Italy, illustrated by the fall of support for
the PRC (‘Party of Communist Re-foundation’) because of its compromising
positions and its endorsement of neo-liberal policies, has been one of
the main reasons for the increase of the votes for the right parties and
the Northern League, the latter having exploited the fears of the
workers in order to raise its anti-immigrant agenda.

The fact that immigrants eventually reacted against the local
inhabitants in Rosarno could have been avoided if the union leaderships
had organised a proper campaign to defend their rights, linking their
struggle to the demands of the wider working class. A clear strategy and
programme is urgently needed to fight against the real enemy: the
capitalist class and the mafia organisations. A common struggle of all
workers, whatever their origins or nationalities, is urgently needed; a
struggle for jobs, decent housing and better living standards for all,
refusing to accept that the capitalist crisis should be paid for by
anyone of us. This must include an implacable fight for the withdrawal
of all the racist laws implemented by the government, which can only
weaken the working class’ resistance and be used to undermine the
democratic rights of all.

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